Pages

02 April 2010

Canada's role in the occupation of Afghanistan

Canada's Role in the Occupation of Afghanistanis a "must read" for anyone willing to have an honest encounter with the many facts of our participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. This document, now published in edited collections, but also available online (here, here, and here), is an excellent resource for anti-war activists and those specifically against the war in Afghanistan. It was produced by the Échec à la Guerre collective.

The following is a summary of the collective's overall position on the war in Afghanistan:

The war in Afghanistan is not a just war; the invasion of Afghanistan was never authorized by the Security Council and cannot be justified by invoking self-defence.

“Reconstruction” and “democracy-building” in the Afghan context are pure propaganda at worst, self-congratulatory rationalization at best. After five years of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, the country is in a disastrous situation that bears no relationship to the stated good intentions of the countries involved.

In reality, the goal of this war has always been to install a regime favourable to US interests and those of its allies. It is part of a broader offensive – the so-called “war on terror” – whose real purpose is to expand the US empire into Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Canada is participating in this strategy in order to preserve and deepen its strategic partnership with the United States, and several large Canadian corporations expect to benefit.

For all these reasons, the collective is calling for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan.

This is the archive of what was formerly the webpage of AJP. It now consists entirely of the essays and posts published by AJP founder, Maximilian C. Forte, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at Concordia University in Montreal (maximilian.forte@concordia.ca). AJP was a Canadian organization for anthropologists interested in supporting struggles for self-determination, decolonizing knowledge production, and resisting the corporatization and militarization of the academy.